Standing on the sweltering field of Scheumann Stadium, Jamill Smith’s mind carries back to exactly how little he understood about the challenges he grew up with.

In some ways, he’s the hometown hero, the Muncie star who walked on at Ball State and climbed the ladder to start and produce at the Division I level. But in other ways, he departed one world for another, even if they’re separated by a scant 6 miles.

“People don’t understand the south side of Muncie,” Smith says. “Muncie and Ball State, they are just two separate things. The south side of Muncie, we really don’t have a lot of money there. Just coming up there, the struggle, it just helped me so much.

“It was just hard. I didn’t know, like really understand how bad I had it.”

See, a neighborhood like some on Muncie’s south side can become its own insulated world. Problems like crime and poverty can become normalized, internalized and understood as basic aspects of life.

Coming up in that world, Smith had support from all sides. His father could always get food on the table and a roof over his head. His grandmother’s home was a safe haven when he needed it. His large family was always there for support. And football brought its own group of coaches and teammates who helped him.

But even that village couldn’t shield him from the realities close by.

“Something happened all the time,” Smith said of the south side. “Like I said, I didn’t realize how bad it was until I got older, and started to realize. Like shootings, I heard shots, seen shootings. I’ve seen shootings. I’ve seen robberies. I’ve seen armed robberies. I’ve seen all that.

“It’s just exposure to a life that a lot of people don’t see, and I didn’t know that until I got out of Muncie.”

New perspective

The first moments to open Smith’s eyes began with a pickup and a long car ride. They took him from whatever home he was living in at the time to a football field.

Some of those journeys took him from the compact world of south Muncie up to the rural farmland of the north side of town. But before that, a semi-pro wrestler who doubled as his youth coach made the trips to his neighborhood in Indianapolis, where he lived for around five years with his mother.

“The people that wanted me to play didn’t come from the same background as me,” Smith said, harkening back to that first coach. “He used to always come pick me up from Haughville, the streets and the bad hoods in Indianapolis.

“When I got back to Muncie, same thing happened. A coach from Delta coming to pick me up all the way on Eighth Street to play football. It just made me see that everybody’s not against you. Some people really do care.”

Playing on those teams started friendships, which meant connections to places like Yorktown or the northern edge of Muncie where Delta sits. In some ways those areas are incredibly close to the place Smith called home on Eighth Street, but in others, they’re a world away.

And that process of expanding his horizons only went further when he reached Ball State’s campus. He played alongside teammates from the countryside of Northern Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois, or, on the other end of the spectrum, a big city like Indianapolis.

And yet the south side was always close. “When you stay in your hometown, that’s usually a danger for kids because they don’t break away from some of the things that could be negative influences,” said Mike Paul, Smith’s high school coach. “But he’s proud to be a Southside kid.”

Smith looked back on his younger self, and almost marveled at the way he once viewed things. He’d called people rich, when in truth, they didn’t have much. They were rich to him, but after seeing the rest of Muncie, staying with friends around Yorktown and Delta, he came to understand how much more he could have.

“It’s another side of this world,” Smith said. “It’s like, I don’t have to stay here. I don’t have to live with the socioeconomic status. It just opened my eyes to see other things and that I can achieve those things if I want to in my life.”

Fire to overcome

On a street of Muncie’s south side, Ashanti Smith plays catch with his 11-year-old son, Jamill. It’s getting late and the October air grows cold, yet Jamill Smith is out running pass patterns, catching throws from his father, a one-time wide receiver for Central High School.

But on one route, Jamill Smith slips, opens a deep cut on the palm of his hand and river of concern from his father.

“I told him, ‘Jamill, let’s go in the house and patch this up.’ ” Ashanti Smith said. “Jamill looked at me with a tear in his eye and said, ‘No daddy, keep going.’ You know what man? I had goose bumps. I didn’t even know what to think. I almost thought that I was being hard on him or something, that I was pushing my son too hard.”

It turned out, that was Jamill, competitive and driving to the last.

That same attitude drove him to the football field as a 95-pound freshman at Southside. Even on the high school level, that’s nothing. Yet here he was, pushing his way into the starting lineup on defense and setting several freshman weightlifting records that still stand at the school.

“I was afraid to put him on the field to tell you the truth,” Paul said. “He probably should have played quarterback as a freshman, but he was so tiny, I was afraid he was actually going to get hurt.”

Looking back, Jamill Smith still smiles at the memory of his first high school touchdown, an interception return that first season.

But from then on, he was a quarterback. Southside wanted its best athlete to pilot a spread attack, and that was Jamill Smith. He wasn’t the fastest in a straight-line race, but he was so quick and agile, he regularly won every other event when Paul ran the Rebels through combine-style drills.

Behind center he grew into a prolific player despite weighing only 138 pounds. As a senior, he racked up 4,182 combined rushing and passing yards and 48 touchdowns in 12 games.

Ashanti Smith remembered the relationship with Paul having a few tough moments when Paul challenged his star in different ways. But Jamill Smith said Paul made sure he left a man of character, painting the image of a weight room adorned with signs reminding players not to steal, cheat or lie.

And Paul always held a high-level of respect for Jamill Smith’s intelligence for the game, especially in how he understood the Rebel offense.

“Of everybody on our team, including the assistant coaches, he understood it second to me,” Paul said.

That intelligence also manifested itself off the field and in the classroom.

Jamill Smith was born in Muncie, but lived with his mother in Indianapolis between kindergarten and fourth grade. In his final year there, he brought home a report card with poor grades, and his mother, Mia Morton, pulled him out of football.

“That was the worst pain ever,” Jamill Smith said. “I wanted to play every day.”

So he attacked his grades with the competitiveness he displayed on the field. He said he always wanted to be the best at anything, raised his hand first, took honors classes and made the National Honor Society in high school.

That pragmatic approach carried its way into his social circle. A neighborhood like the south side is fraught with opportunities to fall into trouble, so he was the one trying to keep others out of it, grabbing friends and telling them not to take the wrong path. Paul and Ashanti Smith said he was a leader among his friends much like he led on the field, and it reflected a deep seriousness within him.

“Anything that had to get me in trouble with football, I wasn’t going to do it,” Jamill Smith said. “And my friends, they’ll tell you, I was that person, ‘Nah, stop, we got practice tomorrow.’ Nobody drank, nobody smoked, nobody did anything.

A few weeks before his final season with the Cardinals, Jamill Smith was hard at work helping the new freshmen move in at Ball State’s dorms. He looked back to his own move-in, a simple reminder of his different path at Ball State.

He didn’t live with other players as a freshman. He was only a walk-on, a regular student trying to become something else.

All the high school stats and accolades got washed away by his 5-foot-7, 138-pound frame. People around him suggested he take the offers from smaller schools, go star in Division II or III or the NAIA. But he wanted to follow the big dream at his hometown school.

So he was knocked out by 8 o’clock in the evening, worn from football and school, while the rest of his freshman floor partied deep into the night.

And football was his thing. His receiver training from his father, dormant through high school, suddenly came into play. The redshirt season gave way to a freshman year as a punt returner. The freshman became a starting sophomore receiver and full-time returner, who became a junior star in 2012 with three separate All-Mid-American Conference nods.

He still has that savvy for the game, and his coach Pete Lembo marvels at how he can recite the responsibilities of everyone on a coverage unit with a given call. But after his sophomore season, he gave Lembo another thing to remember him by.

“Jamill is the first guy that I met,” said Lembo, who was hired the winter of 2008. “We were here a day or two and he came through the office before the spring semester was in session. So that’s always going to be something that I’ll remember.”

Nearing an end

Standing on that field in the hot, sticky humidity of the Indiana summer after practice, Jamill Smith sees a program nearing his vision of what it could be.

He’s progressed from walk-on to standout in five years, and the team has swung up with him. He arrived after the greatest season in program history in 2008 and came to a team that hit the reset button on success.

He has bittersweet feelings as he closes in on his final season of eligibility, but there’s a sort of satisfaction in seeing something come to fruition.

“Ball State is where I envisioned it when I first stepped on campus,” he says of the team that went 9-4 last season and returns much of its lineup. “It’s getting there.”

But he also reflects back on how becoming a Ball State student has impacted him. He might be from the south side, but he doesn’t want to be an ambassador or go around proclaiming himself a college player and hometown hero.

Instead, there’s a bit of estrangement from the old neighborhood. He has friends there, but he says relatives urged him to see Ball State as his home. He’s had a chance to see time pass, as his former high school teammate, Wenstone Nash, has now replaced Paul, who retired after 35 years as Southside head coach, and Nash’s little brother McKenzee is now a walk-on for Ball State, taking the same path Smith once did.

Jamill Smith’s life changed in a profound way earlier this summer. He became a father when his son, Jamill Jr., was born in late June. Since then, he looks at the world differently because he says he’s not just here for himself anymore. He’s here for others.

Maybe that means speaking up when someone does something wrong or being there with congratulations when things go right. He wants to be the sort of person bent on helping others.

“I have somebody that’s going to look up to me,” Jamill Smith said. “So I want to be perfect in everything I do in life now. I just want to be that person that somebody can look up to.”